At Table: Get Fresh Vegetable Stock & The Daily Beast

A quart of homemade vegetable stock followed us home from brunch at the Get Fresh Table and Market a few weeks ago. We'd stopped for a cupcake afterward, because what is brunch without a Hostess-looking chocolate cupcake to wash down one's free-range egg on organic brioche with micro-greens sandwich, and by the time we got home it was defrosted enough to coax into two giant stock ice-cubes and put back into the freezer for when the moment demanded.

Which immediately starting me wondering: What would the moment demand?

In The Gastronomy of Marriage I write about how I'm generally more comfortable following a recipe, while Rich is generally more happy winging it. Which, I was recently told, is rather common.

The writer Elizabeth Cline called me a few weeks ago, while working on today's "Sex and the Kitchen" article in The Daily Beast about the relationship between who does the cooking and who has the power. She said the idea for the article came from reading that sexism was essentially born the moment women stepped into the kitchen. (Or, up to the caveman's fire, as it were, with perhaps some rosemary-skewered mammoth.)

Elizabeth also said that most of the women she'd spoken with for the article tended to follow recipes, while the men in their lives improvised, and she suggested this was a learned, gender-based phenomenon — which I had never before considered but of course makes perfect sense. America likes its girls well behaved, tidy, following directions and the status quo; while with doting smiles we encourage boys to be more wild, more improvisational. The world's inventors.

What a falling-through-the-floor feeling it is to realize that one isn't whistling one's own tune, after all, but mouthing the big, dumb drumbeat of the masses.

That said, "Gastronomy" takes place in 2005, and since then I've come into a bit more confidence in the kitchen, so I had a few ideas for what to do with that vegetable stock. Risotto was one, with the peas and mint at the market lately, but a few days of heat, followed by days upon days of humidity, dissuaded the standing over a steamy skillet.

But when the downstairs neighbors agreed to come up for dinner last week, during that brief stint of cool nights, I determined a new fate for the stock, and used it to braise chicken thighs (which if they're free range and organic and vegetarian fed and, ideally, local, I've started to eat now and then, after about 18 years of poultry-less-ness).

I browned the chicken in a big skillet, set them aside and wiped it out, sauteed an onion and some garlic scapes in olive oil, added a splash of white wine, and when it was mostly evaporated I mixed in a squeeze of tomato paste. Then I lined the skillet with four lemon slices, set the chicken on top of them, poured in the stock until the chicken was nearly covered and threw in a bay leaf. That simmered, lid on, for about a half hour, and then I added a small diced zucchini. Twenty minutes later, the stock was reduced to a thickish sauce, I added the fresh peas and mint, let them cook for two minutes, and then tossed the whole thing through some gnocchi.

That night one of the neighbors, after cleaning her plate and offering very sweet compliments, asked what recipe I'd followed. I hope the beaming pride in my chest didn't shine out my mouth when I opened it to say, "I just made it up..."
















*While I did wing it, it wasn't also a never-before-made-by-me dish — a combination I hesitate to attempt when other people's dinners are on the line. Pictured above is my second winter-time go at the braised thighs, using what was on hand that night: carrots, celery, and, I believe, some fresh-though-drying-out rosemary. We ate it with oven-roasted potatoes and a handful of undressed baby arugula, which we dragged through the chicken sauce on the bottoms of our plates.